Now much of the north country is industrial forest owned by the timber companies, and lumber trucks make their way along the roads carrying stacks of freshly cut trees. The companies cut swaths through acres of forest in the winter, removing every tree in their path and piling them during March and April. Wood is the state's wealth. and even my grandfather, like many on the coast, used to grow spruce and fir for sale as Christmas trees, harvesting and selling them from November 1 to mid-December.
But there are still a few places where the mature forest remains untouched, with animal trails and moose droppings leading to secluded watering holes fed by waterfalls that tumble over rocks and stones and fallen trees. This was one of the last regions to have wolves and mountain lions and caribou. There are still ten million uninhabited acres in Maine and the state is greener now than it was one hundred years ago, when the exhaustion of the thin soil caused agriculture to decline and the forest reclaimed the land, as is its way, and walls that had once sheltered families now sheltered only hemlock and pine.
A man could lose himself in that wilderness, if he chose.
Dark Hollow lay about five miles north of Greenville, close by the eastern shore of Moosehead Lake and the two hundred thousand acres of protected wilderness in Baxter State Park, where Mount Katahdin dominates the skyline at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. I had half-considered stopping off in Greenville-the road was dark and the evening cold-but I knew that finding Meade Payne was more important. People who had been close to Billy Purdue-his wife, his child, the woman who had organized his adoption-were dying, and dying badly. Payne had to be warned.
Greenville was the gateway to the north woods, and wood had sustained this town and the surrounding area for many years. There had even been a lumber mill in the town providing jobs for the people of Greenville and its surrounds, until it closed in the mid-seventies when the economic situation made it unprofitable to operate. A lot of people left the area then and those that remained tried to make new lives in tourism, fishing and hunting, but Greenville and the smaller towns scattered farther north-Beaver Cove, Kokadjo and Dark Hollow, where the power lines ended and the wilderness truly began-were still poor. When the golf club at Greenville had raised its fees from ten dollars to twelve dollars per round, there had been an uproar.
I drove up Lily Bay Road, for many years the winter road used for hauling heavy supplies to the logging camps, snow piled high on each side, the woods stretching beyond, until I came to Dark Hollow. It was a small town, barely more than two blocks at its center, with a police department at the farthest limit of the northern end. Dark Hollow got some of the tourism and hunting overflow from Greenville, but not much. There was no view of the lake from its streets, only the mountains and the trees. There was one motel, the Tamara Motor Inn, which looked like a relic from the fifties, with a high arched frontage across which its name glowed in red and green neon. There were one or two handicraft shops selling scented candles and the kind of furniture that left pieces of bark on your pants if you sat on it. A bookstore-cum-coffee shop, a diner and a drugstore made up a considerable part of the town's commercial area, where piles of icy snow still lay in the gutters and in the shadows of the buildings.
Only the diner was still open. Inside, there were reproductions of old concert posters and landscapes by what I took to be local artists. In one corner there was a framed photo of a kid in an army uniform beside an older man, some faded red, white and blue ribbon around it, but I didn't look too closely. A couple of old folks sat in a booth drinking coffee and shooting the breeze and four young guys tried to look cool and vaguely menacing without bursting their pimples when they sneered.
I ordered a club sandwich and a mug of coffee. It was good and almost made me forget, for a moment, what had happened back in Bangor. I asked the waitress, whose name was Annie, for directions to the Payne place and she gave them to me with a smile, although she told me that there was frost and maybe more snow expected and that the road was poor at the best of times.
"You a friend of Meade's?" she asked. Annie seemed keen to talk, more keen than I was. She had red hair and red lipstick, and dark blue makeup around her eyes. Combined with her naturally pale features, the total effect was of an unfinished drawing, like something abandoned by a distracted child.
"No," I replied. "I just want to talk to him about something."
Her smile faltered a little. "It's nothing bad, is it? Because that old man has had his share of bad times."
"No," I lied. "It's nothing bad. I'm sorry to hear that things haven't been going so good for Meade."
She shrugged, and the smile regained some of its vigor. "He lost his wife a couple of years back, then his nephew died in the Gulf during Desert Storm. He's kept pretty much to himself since then. We don't see him around here much anymore."
Annie leaned over, her breasts brushing my arm as she took away the remains of my sandwich. "You want anything else?" she asked brightly, bringing an end to the Meade Payne conversation. I wasn't sure if there was a subtext to the question. I decided that there wasn't. Life tended to be simpler that way.
"No, thanks."
She tore the check from her pad with a flourish. "Then I'll just leave you with this." She flashed me another smile as she slipped the check beneath the bowl of creamers. "You take care now, sugar," she said, as she sashayed away.
"I will," I replied. I felt kind of relieved when she was gone.
Meade Payne didn't have a phone, or at least his name wasn't in the book. Reluctantly, I decided not to talk to him until the morning. I got a room at the Tamara for twenty-eight dollars and slept in an old bed with a high, thick mattress and a carved wood bedstead. I woke once during the night, when the smell of rotting leaves and the sound of heavy decaying things moving beneath them became unbearable.
The waitress had been right: a heavy frost covered the ground when I left the Tamara the next morning and the blades of grass on the motel's narrow strip of lawn were like carved crystal as I walked. In the bright morning sunlight, cars passed slowly down the main street and folks in coats and gloves puffed their way along like steam engines. I left the car at the Tamara and made my way on foot to the diner. From outside, I could see that most of the booths were already full and there was a welcoming air of community, of belonging, among those seated inside. Waitresses-Annie didn't seem to be among them-flitted from table to table like butterflies and a fat, bearded man in an apron chatted with patrons beside the register. I was almost at the door when a voice behind me said-gently, softly, familiarly-"Charlie?" I turned around and the past and the present collided in the memory of a kiss.
Lorna Jennings was six years older than I was and lived a mile from my grandfather's house. She was small and lithe, no taller than five-two and certainly no more than one hundred pounds, with short, dark hair cut in a bob and a mouth that always seemed to be entering into, or emerging from, a kiss. Her eyes were blue-green and her skin was porcelain white.